I’m really angry with the British government right now. In some ways they’re worse than the Tories, because at least with them you knew where you stood. With Starmer he keeps trying to outdo the far right, which leads to them adopting even further right policies, and him adopting them and so on. The cracking down on freedom of speech is genuinely scary, whether it be through the online safety act or abusing terrorism legislation to proscribe direct action groups. They need to fix the housing and healthcare crises urgently, but they’re tinkering at the seams while the far right are on the cusp of taking power in 2029.

On the local level, I don’t like our elected assembly much either, and I feel like all they do is pose for photoshoots and blame all their mistakes on the government in London.

When I was 5, then I seemingly got better as a teenager and didn’t need an inhaler for about ten years. I got covid in my early twenties and got re-diagnosed after it ruined my lungs. And I do mean re-diagnosed, they wouldn’t prescribe me new inhalers from my original diagnosis after ten years of not taking them and I had to get a peak flow prescribed and do the tests over the phone since we couldn’t do it in person thanks to the pandemic.

They did pay for the “shit your pants” spell, and that does happen shortly after death…so in a roundabout monkey’s paw sort of way I guess that one worked

I did it so much in a retail job that the supervisor told me to stop saying sorry all the time and of course I immediately replied “sorry.” Being autistic and socially anxious will do that unfortunately. It’s taken time and I’ve gotten a bit better at not apologising for things that aren’t my fault, but it’s still an annoying habit.

For photos, immich is great if you’re willing to self-host. It’s pretty much a drop-in replacement for Google photos, and lets you tweak the machine learning and stuff like that if you want automated identification of your photos. A raspberry pi is enough to get going, maybe something fancier if you want the machine learning. Google Drive can be replaced with Nextcloud as well if you go down the self-hosting rabbit hole.

Ente is probably your best bet if you don’t want to host anything yourself. I used proton drive for photos before but thought it wasn’t particularly suitable as if you’re looking for a particular photo it takes ages for it to load from their servers.

Also an autistic vegan here! I’d wager that the % of autistic people in the vegan community is higher than in the general population. I didn’t do it for any health reasons, but going vegan was a nice way to find out I’m lactose intolerant and food isn’t supposed to hurt.

The Dark Hedges. Not our number one tourist destination, but probably the most overrated one. It’s some trees that appeared in Game of Thrones and the over-tourism + the increase in stormy weather thanks to climate change is killing them.

We’ve more popular places like the Giant’s Causeway and the Derry walls, but those places are worth visiting at least.

Same, I’ve had my chipolo for nearly two full years now and haven’t needed to replace the batteries despite them being in constant use. Especially on my keys which must get rung about once a week actually never mind I just checked the app there and the keys died a few days ago. But still, nearly two years and a quick swap of a button battery to get them going again is probably better than 6 months where the USB port or the battery could easily degrade.

That’s a fair point. I suppose like any movement there’s a wide spectrum of people and one end of the spectrum would be those who are as strict as that. I don’t think it’s very productive to be that strict though, certainly where I live and with the health conditions I have it would be impossible to live life so strictly compared to someone in top health living in a major city.

There is a surprising amount of debate over that in vegan circles. Beyond Meat taste test their burgers against cow burgers to compare the flavour and some vegans will say you can’t consider those burgers vegan while others would say it’s a very small amount of animal consumption to allow for a vegan burger that might help convert more people and so the benefit outweights the harm massively. I’m vegan and I don’t really know what side to lean towards, but there’s debate over everything from honey to almonds, and debate on whether it’s acceptable to order vegan food from non-vegan restaurants, just as examples.

Shizuku + Canta on f-droid are great for accomplishing this as well, you just start wireless debugging and tick the apps you want to uninstall.

I deleted mine in January, after all the tech CEOs went to kiss the ring at the US inauguration. I don’t trust them at all to delete anything but at least they aren’t getting more data from me.

I’ve had my account since 2012 when I got a Nexus 4 so a lot of my life was tied up in it. It’s not something you can just up and decide to do one day and I’d been working my way to deletion since last summer and just went faster with the process in January. If you self-host things it makes it easier because there’s a lot of good replacements for their services e.g. nextcloud if you need an office suite, immich to replace Google photos. So I’ve got thirteen years of my life backed up to a raspberry pi sitting under my TV instead of being mined on a google server to train an LLM.

The only issue I’ve had is my phone keeps complaining that I’m not signed in with a google account, and there’s a few email addresses I hadn’t updated from gmail to my new accounts. But it’s been surprisingly plain sailing without having an account, and at least one of those issues will be sorted by moving to a phone with custom ROM support.

Two kids smeered their shit on the bathroom walls then climbed on the roof. There was some much more serious stuff but that was the funnier one I guess.

It was in the countryside as well, so we’d get a farm animal wandering about the grounds about once a year which was always exciting.

Thanks, a good rant is nice to read sometimes. Completely agree on Pixels – even if I got second hand, they seem so unreliable based on having one in the past and knowing a few that have had one. There seems to be so much toxicity coming from that project.

I might try it out then. I’ve heard mixed things on e, something about security patches coming months later than other ROMs, but I see murena claim that they are in line with most android manufacturers, just not as quick as hardened ROMs like graphene. Maybe I’ll see this week about swapping over.

I’m very tempted to get one, at least once there’s a lineage build for it, since it will let me finally degoogle completely. Currently on an S24 and even with ADB it’s still a nightmare with the phone constantly telling me there’s an “issue” with my google account (which doesn’t exist anymore) and google services like gemini reinstalling after updates.

I’ve tried tailscale and cloudflare tunnels in the past and ended up just using PiVPN to set up a WireGuard VPN on my Pi5. Tailscale for some reason was very slow for me, and cloudflare tunnels have a 100mb limit iirc which isn’t ideal for streaming. PiVPN is quite straightforward, it sets everything up for you and all you have to do is forward a UDP port. That was the bit I was most worried about, but, unless I’ve misunderstood something, because a UDP port will just ignore invalid requests to the outside world it will appear closed so it’s not very risky. It then generates a key for each device which you can scan from a QR code onto your VPN client. I have my phone set to auto-connect to the tunnel when I disconnect from my home wifi network and the tunnel is fast enough that I’ve accidentally turned off my phone’s wifi connection before and streamed a TV show through the tunnel over mobile data and not noticed any difference in speed.

They seem pretty good for not trapping too much heat, but we have quite cool summers here so what I would consider an unbearably hot day is probably different to most people. I could comfortably sleep in it under 24°C, anything above that and I can’t sleep no matter what type of blanket I have anyway. There are cooling ones made of cotton that might work if you’re in a hotter climate but they cost a fair bit more.

No. Even in the summer during a heatwave I was sleeping with a 15 tog duvet because I need the weight, until I got a weighted blanket which is much more comfortable. I can fall asleep on the couch without a blanket though which is weird, just not in bed.

I have an S24, Gemini can be safely removed using Canta but is sometimes reinstalled when Samsung push out updates which is annoying. You can disable the play store without causing a boot loop but as far as I can tell there’s no way around play services since it can’t be disabled. I’m just making do with this phone for now and plan to get something I can install a custom ROM on later but it really sucks.